Sunday, April 04, 2004

Robert Scoble is in in Kunal's World now, (Now I know why we called them K-Logs) or How to build push button blogging.

Robert Scoble (Microsoft blogger at Large) discovers a new piece of the puzzle :

You know, Kunal's OutlookMT feature is, for me, a killer feature. One of those that'll change -- dramatically -- my life forever.The Outlook team and Sharepoint team should hire Kunal to implement this feature ASAP. It is THAT IMPORTANT.

What does it do?

It adds a new folder to Outlook. OK, let's say Bill Gates emailed me right now. Let's say I wanted to post that email out to the world? In the old world I'd need to open up Radio UserLand, copy the email, clean up the HTML, then click post.New "Kunal's" world? Copy the email over to the folder. It's posted. Done. No more work.Do you have any idea how this is going to change knowledge management? You just watch!Now, keep in mind, this isn't commercial quality. Lots of work to do. But he's responsive. I bet that by the end of the week he has it working well enough for almost everyone. The quality difference between yesterday and today is huge.

Hmm... I wonder how hard it would be to add the sort of drag to folder to publish functionality to a Lotus Notes mail template or a Notes RSS news reader?

After thinking about this some more It occurs to me it would be trivial (SMoP, "simplify a matter of programming") to writer a Lotus Mail to Domino Blog add-on : a Shared action button "Blog this " (appearing on the Mail form and various views ) , a profile form to capture which domino blog I'm using (need to know the Form name, and some default behaviour , and the path to it), and a small amount of LotusScript. The drag to publish functionality could then be added if desired. All this could also be added to any Lotus Notes RSS news reader in 3 shakes of a lambs tail.

As an additional comment : The are 2 reasons that Mr Scoble is raving about this (I think , and maybe he should be clearer about) :

He is using a outlook based RSS news reader, so such a tool makes it much easier to turn a Feed item or a mail item into a blog item, without going all cut and paste.

in a corporate intranet blog (intra-blog.. i-blog ? hmmm), escalating a person to person (or small group) email into a corporate Knowledge log item, preserved for all time, has high value

Third, the real innovation here isn't for public blogs. It's for corporate knowledge management. When I left NEC I took one gig of email with me -- none of that is available to any of my former coworkers. All that knowledge is simply GONE. After 11 months at Microsoft I have hundreds of megabytes of stuff in my "resources" folder. This is a folder where I store anything interesting to me as a Microsoft employee. For instance, the internal link to get the latest Longhorn builds from. Now, if you're a new Microsoft employee, finding stuff like that is hard. It took me 11 months to build up a store of useful stuff. Why shouldn't I share that with my coworkers?...This is such an important feature to corporate knowledge management sharing that I can't sit still tonight. I'm serious. This feature has me tingling. It's what I've wanted for so long.